To create a content strategy that engages and motivates your audience, you need to do a comprehensive social media audit.

In this article I’ll share how to perform a social media audit to build a successful social media content strategy.

#1: Identify Your Competitors

Most businesses have already identified the main players in their industry by searching Google or social networks.

If you don’t already have a list of competitors at hand, just search for your site on SEMrush to see a list of related providers. SEMrush automatically sorts them by competition level based on how many common keywords the sites rank for in Google.

Identify your competitors using SEMrush.

Once you’ve identified some potential competitors, the next step is to check out whether they’re active on social media. Simply visit their websites and search for social media icons, then visit those profiles. If they’re posting actively across social channels, add them to your list of competitors.

#2: Establish Your Baselines

To do a social audit, you’ll need to sign up for a small or medium account. A small account will allow you to track your site plus two competitors; with the medium account, you can track your site and up to nine competitors.

Follow the same steps for Facebook, Google+ and all of the other networks that you’d like to track.

Next, follow the steps on TrueSocialMetrics to create an account and add your competitors.

Create an account in TrueSocialMetrics to add your competitors.

Click on Metric for an overview of the account’s social activity for a predetermined time period.

An overview of what a report looks like for each of the sites over a specific time period.

Here’s what each metric means:

Conversation rate—How many conversations does each post generate? This may include comments on Facebook and Google+ and replies to a tweet.

Amplification rate—How often is the content reshared or retweeted?

Applause rate—How many people like each post? On Twitter it’s favorites, on Facebook it’s likes and on Google+ it’s the +1.

The next step is to export all of the charts and aggregate the data into a single spreadsheet. Unfortunately there’s no automatic way to do this, so you’ll have to enter it manually.

By looking at the data in your spreadsheet, you can use a variety of metrics to evaluate the social media performance of your site and compare it with your competitors’.

Overview of competitive social metrics by social profile for Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today and HubSpot.

Twitter

In the example above, you can see that although Social Media Today posts four times more often than HubSpot and Social Media Examiner on Twitter, their conversation, amplification and applause rates are lower. When it comes to Twitter, the competitor to watch is HubSpot.

#4: Analyze Audience Engagement

Next, let’s look at the audience analysis for each of the social profiles.

Let’s start with HubSpot’s Google+ profile, since we know it’s the most successful. In this report, you can see the most engaged members of HubSpot’s Google+ audience.

HubSpot’s most engaged Google+ users for February 2014.

When creating an engagement strategy for your social profiles, this list can give you some people to add to your Google+ circles. Watch and interact with their content so you can lure them over to your own social profiles.

In addition, keep an eye out for your own most engaged audience members. Remember to thank them and share their content, too.

#5: Discover the Most Shared Blog Content

You can also analyze the success of blog content.

Social Media Examiner’s most shared blog posts for February 2014.

From this list, we can see that Social Media Examiner’s audience is highly interested in comprehensive research and overall, big-picture trends.

Another interesting finding is that although their niche targets social media, a post about SEO had high engagement, indicating that their audience is interested in both social AND search.

If you do an ascending sort, you can see which posts had the least amount of shares and engagement. This helps you identify topics that people aren’t interested in, as well as guest writers who bring the least amount of engagement.

#6: Research Competitor Strategy

Don’t limit your audit to data gathered from TrueSocialMetrics. Make an in-person visit to all of your competitors’ profiles to note the overall strategy behind their social content.

Look into things like ratios of original to curated content, entertainment to industry-specific content and the most shared content.

#7: Perform Opportunity and Gap Analysis

After you’ve analyzed the social profiles of competitors, you can aggregate all of the information into an opportunity and gap analysis report.

When you invest time into a comprehensive social media audit, your findings will provide a strong foundation for your social strategy.

After you put your strategy into motion, remember to regularly audit your site and your competitors’ in order to modify your strategy. Use what you learn to further capitalize on what works and improve your own weaknesses.

What are some other tools you’ve used for social media audits? What other information can be used from social audits to inform your social media strategy? Share your thoughts and comments below.

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